I've Had Awakening Experiences But I'm Still Stuck: What's Missing?
You've had the experience.
The moment of clarity. The profound insight. The feeling of finally understanding something fundamental about yourself, about life, about reality.
Maybe it happened during meditation. Maybe in a plant medicine ceremony. Maybe on a spiritual retreat, in breathwork, during a therapy breakthrough, or while traveling a different country and culture.
For a moment—or a day, or a week—everything made sense. You felt connected. Whole. Alive in a way you'd never experienced before.
The anxiety lifted. The self-judgment quieted. You saw yourself, the world, your life from a completely different perspective. You thought: This is it. This changes everything.
And then.
You came back.
Back to the same anxiety. The same patterns. The same behaviors you swore you'd left behind. The same you.
What happened?
Was the experience not real? Did you do something wrong? Are you just unable to hold onto what you saw?
None of the above.
You're not broken. The experience was real. What you saw was true.
But experience alone isn't transformation.
And that gap—between the profound moment and lasting change—is where most people get stuck.
Why Awakening Doesn't Automatically Equal Healing
Here's the truth that most spiritual teachers, therapists, and ceremony facilitators don't tell you:
Insight does not equal integration.
Your conscious mind can have a breakthrough while your nervous system is still running the exact same survival patterns it's been running for years.
Let me give you an example.
You're in an ayahuasca ceremony. You have a profound realization: I am love. I've always been love. The universe itself is loving me into existence.
It's real. It's beautiful. It shifts something fundamental in how you see yourself.
Two weeks later, you're people-pleasing again. Abandoning yourself in relationships. Saying yes when you mean no. Shrinking to make others comfortable.
What happened to "I am love"?
The insight was real. But it didn't reach the layer where your actual behavior patterns live.
Because your patterns aren't just ideas in your conscious mind. They're encoded in your nervous system. In your body. In subconscious beliefs that fire off before you even have a conscious thought.
Awakening shows you what's possible.
Integration makes it your lived reality.
Without integration, the profound experience becomes just another beautiful memory. Something you once felt but can't seem to access anymore. Evidence that you're failing at spirituality, therapy, healing—whatever framework you're using.
But you're not failing. You're just missing the bridge.
The Integration Gap
Most spiritual work, therapeutic processes, and psychedelic experiences focus almost entirely on the experience itself, the moment it peaks.
The breakthrough. The insight. The moment of seeing.
Very little attention goes to the question: How do you actually bring this back into your body? The part of you that is not there yet? Your daily life? Your nervous system?
Let me tell you about one of my own experiences.
I was swimming in a lake. The water was cold, almost uncomfortably so. I was alone. And for reasons I still can't fully explain, something shifted.
I felt, not thought, but felt, that I was being held. That the water itself was loving me. It was not just me keeping myself afloat, but the water, nature, existence, the universe—whatever you want to call it—was actively, intimately caring for me.
It wasn't a concept. It was a direct, embodied experience of being loved by life itself.
For someone who'd spent years feeling fundamentally alone, separate, unworthy—this was everything.
And then my life continued. And slowly, the feeling faded.
Within days, I was back to feeling un-held. Alone. Separate. Because there were still parts of me, that felt abandoned, lonely, in despair, that were not touched by that experience in the lake.
The insight was real. The feeling was real. But it hadn't reached the deeper layers where my patterns actually lived.
I hadn't yet done the somatic work to integrate it. To bring that felt sense of being held into the parts of me that were still running survival patterns from childhood. The parts that didn't believe safety was possible.
That lake moment became the catalyst. It showed me what was possible. But it took years of integration work—of learning to track those abandoned parts, to stay with the loneliness instead of thinking my way around it, to slowly teach my nervous system that being held wasn't just a peak experience but something I could access—before it became my lived reality.
Integration is the bridge between "I saw the truth" and "I live as that truth."
What Your Nervous System Needs
Here's what most people don't realize:
Your nervous system doesn't care about your insights.
It doesn't care that you had a profound realization during meditation. It doesn't care that the medicine showed you your patterns with crystalline clarity. It doesn't care that you know, intellectually, that you're safe, worthy, loved.
Your nervous system cares about one thing: Does this feel safe in my body?
And here's the problem:
Awakening experiences often happen when you're out of your normal state. You're in ceremony. On retreat. In deep meditation. In an altered state of consciousness. This allows you to have an experience that not all of you is capable of having—but for that moment, a part of you is.
You don't live in altered states. Most of your life is not a peak experience. Your normal state will always be a combination of all the parts of you.
And in your normal state, until you do the work, your nervous system is still running the same programming it's been running since childhood.
Let me give you an example of how this plays out.
Imagine someone—we'll call her Marta—who does ayahuasca and has a powerful realization: her father's constant criticism wasn't about her inadequacy. It was about his own pain, his own unmet needs, his own father's cruelty echoing forward.
She sees this with complete clarity. She feels compassion for him. She understands, for the first time, that his harshness says nothing about her worth.
Beautiful insight. Real healing, right?
Two months later, her boss gives her critical feedback on a project. Totally reasonable feedback. Not harsh, not personal.
And her body freezes. Her chest tightens. Her throat closes. She can barely speak. She feels small, ashamed, like she's failing at everything.
What happened to the insight?
It's still there. In her conscious mind, she knows the criticism isn't about her worth. She can articulate the insight perfectly.
But her nervous system hasn't experienced safety around criticism yet. It's only had a conceptual realization.
Her body is still running the pattern: Criticism = danger. I need to freeze. I need to make myself small.
This isn't failure. This is biology.
Your nervous system doesn't update through insight. It updates through experience.
Integration is experiencing the opposite of what hurt you, repeatedly. Staying present when you'd normally freeze. Feeling your worth when you'd normally collapse. Choosing connection when you'd normally isolate. Until the new pattern becomes familiar enough to feel safe.
Until it becomes the default.
Why the Glimpse Fades
You can't think your way into embodying an insight.
The profound state you accessed during the ceremony, the retreat, the breakthrough session—it's not sustainable through willpower or positive thinking or trying really hard to remember what you saw.
Because your subconscious patterns are stronger than your conscious intentions.
Much stronger.
Your nervous system will always revert to what's familiar. Not because you're weak. Not because the insight wasn't real. But because familiar equals safe, even when familiar equals suffering.
This is basic neurobiology.
Your brain is designed to keep you alive, not to keep you enlightened. And it keeps you alive by running patterns that have worked before. Even if "worked" just means "you survived."
The glimpse fades because you haven't built the capacity to sustain it.
You saw the truth. But your nervous system hasn't learned how to live there yet.
Think of it like this: You had a profound experience of what it's like to speak fluent French. You felt what it would be like to think in French, dream in French, express yourself effortlessly in French.
But you don't actually speak French.
The glimpse showed you the destination. But you haven't walked the path. You haven't put in the hours of practice, the gradual skill-building, the repetition that makes something second nature.
Integration is the practice that makes awakening into embodiment.
What Integration Actually Looks Like
Integration isn't one big shift.
It's gradual nervous system re-patterning. It's working with the felt sense of your insights, not just the conceptual understanding.
Here's what that might look like in practice:
Instead of just knowing you're worthy, you learn to track what unworthiness actually feels like in your body. The sensation in your chest. The impulse to shrink. The way your breath changes.
You stay with those sensations instead of immediately trying to think them away or fix them or transcend them.
You learn to recognize: This is the pattern. This is what unworthiness feels like.
And then, from that embodied awareness—not from willpower, but from actually being with yourself—you choose differently.
You speak anyway. You take up space anyway. You let yourself be seen anyway.
Not because you've convinced yourself you're worthy. But because you're learning to stay present with the discomfort of the old pattern while your nervous system slowly builds capacity for the new one.
And here's the fundamental shift: you're no longer rejecting unworthiness.
It's no longer something you're avoiding feeling. And when you stop avoiding it, its grip releases. It doesn't need your attention so desperately because you've trained yourself to be willing to feel it. Maybe even to welcome it when it shows up.
Not because you're a masochist. But because you understand that this part of you—the part that feels unworthy—deserves your love as much as anything else in you.
You understand that this part is not an enemy. It's a friend. One that helped you survive in the past. One that's now asking for your help—asking not to be alone inside you anymore.
This happens through somatic work. Through shadow work. Through nervous system regulation. Through tracking your actual felt experience instead of just analyzing it.
The insight you had—the awakening, the breakthrough, the realization—becomes the north star.
But integration is the path.
And this path is slower than the breakthrough moment. It's less dramatic. It doesn't feel like everything changing all at once.
But it's what actually changes your life.
It's the difference between knowing the truth and being the truth.
The Work of Coming Home
Your awakening experiences weren't wasted.
They weren't false promises. They weren't illusions. They weren't just your brain on drugs or endorphins or wishful thinking.
They showed you what's on the other side. What's possible. What you're moving toward.
But knowing the destination isn't the same as walking the path.
You can't skip the journey just because you've seen where it leads.
Integration is the work of bringing your body, your nervous system, your daily reality into alignment with what you've seen.
It's learning to inhabit the truth you glimpsed, not just remember it.
It's teaching your nervous system that the new way is safe. That you can stay open even when it's uncomfortable. That you can choose differently even when every cell in your body is screaming for the familiar pattern.
This is where transformation actually happens.
Not in the peak experience. In the patient, persistent work of integration.
In choosing to feel instead of needing to feel good. To stay instead of flee. To be with yourself instead of abandoning yourself.
Again. And again. And again.
Until one day you realize: the glimpse isn't fading anymore.
You're living there.
If you've had profound experiences but can't seem to embody them, you're not alone.
This is the most common gap I see in my work. Brilliant, self-aware people who've done meditation, therapy, plant medicine, spiritual seeking—who've had real moments of clarity—but can't translate them into lasting change.
I specialize in integration. In helping you bridge the gap between insight and embodied transformation. Between seeing the truth and living it.
Let's talk about how to make your awakening experiences into your lived reality.
